Watch: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at How Toys Are Made

Before your favorite action figures land on the shelves of Walmart and Toys R Us, they’ve already lived a full life. Prior to the mass manufacturing, packaging and shipping, many toys are born in a little studio in the middle of the country. It’s there that the Hulks and Terminators acquire the bulging veins and contoured muscles that give them their life-like quality.

In the mini-doc The Secret Story of Toys, filmmaker Anthony Ladesich follows three artists from Kansas City toy prototyping shop True Cast Studio as they go through the intricate process of carving, sculpting, and casting toys.

The craftsmanship that goes into creating each toy is astonishing.

“Before I ever got into this, I remember looking at toys and just kind of figuring, well a computer must do that,” Adam Smith, owner of True Cast, tells Ladesich. “I didn’t get that actually people just sat there and sculpted all of this stuff.” Smith and his small team (which includes his sister and her husband) are now those people.

Like most artistic endeavors, sculpting toys is a painstaking process. It begins when the original sculptures, often made out of fragile clay, arrive at the studio. Most of the time, these toys arrive in dozens of separate pieces—joints, hair, legs, shoes—and it’s up to the True Cast team to correctly assemble them and carve life into the blank canvases.

“Basically your job is to observe something as obsessively as possible—that’s the invisible half of your job,” says Jason Frailey, one of the True Cast sculptors. “The visible part is when you then deposit it into this clay.” Using magnifying glasses, scalpels and hand-held blow torches, the artists ensure no feature is overlooked, even down to the stubble on a toy’s chin. “You can really torture yourself with the details,” Frailey adds.

The craftsmanship that goes into creating each toy, from a Napoleon Dynamite bobble head to a plastic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figure, is astonishing, but it’s often overlooked once the toy is in its glossy packaging. It’s no worry to the artists, though, who say they’re really living out their childhood fantasies. “At the end of all of it, what you’re really doing is you’re trying to put, you know, a professional suit on the whole thing,” Frailey says. “But you’re basically just being a kid.”